I spent the past week modeling environments for Masks, with a focus on getting the environment done for this really long scene — the longest scene in Catalyst Wake. For clarity purposes, I'll call it the "final battle scene" for now. Not all the environments are done yet, but the ones I worked on this week were the most challenging ones.
I'm going to try tackling the final battle scene first, and my plan is to create around 12 CGs a day for two weeks straight to finish it. I'm calling this type of marathon I do a "gauntlet" because... it sounds cool. But also, a gauntlet is a challenge that you do in a public space, in a manner of speaking. Because I'm announcing that I'm going to do this publicly, it helps with my motivation to follow through on it I think.
In other news, I've been experimenting with AI tools to help enhance textures recently! Topaz AI has a great suite of various photography AIs. The one that's been the most helpful for me is Gigapixel AI which increases the resolution of the image. There's some potential there for creating stylized backgrounds, but honestly, human artists are still better at that.
Like most 3d artists, I use a lot of textures from Textures.com. But they don't always have a large resolution available. I've been trying to get around some of the issues with low res textures by trying to make procedural textures with Cheetah3D's node-based texturing system. However, it's not always ideal and I'm not very skilled at that. The AI solution has been more reliable and gets really good results most of the time.
I'm excited about the future applications of AI in art and I'll definitely be making use of it as it becomes more accessible!
Until next time!
— LockedOn.